If you run a business today, then you know how important it is to be found online. Online marketing has become a huge industry for businesses today, and it is becoming increasingly more competitive.

The good news, however, is that there still is a lot of opportunity for businesses to gain an advantage over their competitors online if they use the right strategies. One such strategy is utilizing backlinks to help improve your search rankings. Here, we’ll talk about why backlinks are important and how you can utilize them.

What are Backlinks?

A backlink is a link from another website that leads back to a page on your site. You’ll find backlinks in most blogs online when they reference information from somewhere else, or if they want to point you in a direction to learn more about that subject.

While a backlink, in essence, is there to help the reader to learn more about a subject if they’re interested, it’s also an indicator for major search engines like Google of what sites are trusted authorities on certain subjects. For instance, if you owned a snowboarding website and you had lots of other websites linking back to you in articles about snowboarding, Google would look at all those backlinks and decide that you were an authority on snowboarding. This, in turn, can help you to rank higher for snowboarding-related keywords that people type in on Google.

Since backlinks are a huge indicator of trust and authority on search engines, they are very valuable to obtain. If you’re running your business the right way and making waves for the right reasons, a lot of these backlinks will come back to you organically. That being said, there are some backlink strategies that can be employed to help speed up the process.

Backlink Strategies

There are many backlink strategies, but some are easier to start with than others. One of the most common strategies includes employing a company to help build backlinks for you. By utilizing a network of writers that frequently write for online publications, you can pay to have your company linked back to a certain number of times. The downside to this approach is that to get links from higher quality sites may cost you more money and you can’t always control the message or how the link gets inserted.

Another method of getting backlinks is to work with other companies that are related to yours (but not direct competitors) and establish a relationship with them. You can pat each other’s backs, in a sense, and link to each other for services the other doesn’t do but that potential customers would need.